


Estás como ausente

by Petra



Category: Life on Mars (UK)/Ashes to Ashes
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-28
Updated: 2010-06-28
Packaged: 2017-10-10 07:36:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/97254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petra/pseuds/Petra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like going to Mexico, and getting used to the heat, the noise, and the music there, and then coming home and finding that it's November.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Estás como ausente

**Author's Note:**

> Sleepy/unconscious for Kink Bingo. Pre-read by [](http://d-generate-girl.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**d_generate_girl**](http://d-generate-girl.dreamwidth.org/).

  
In Sam Tyler's most recent session with her, Alex said, "Try going out. Seeing people. Maybe it'll spark something for you, Sam."

Apparently he took her advice--though where he found that shirt in this day and age, has he been wandering secondhand shops in his state?--because there he is, holding down part of the bar, looking as though he wandered in from his imaginary 1973.

He's as pale as death, or close enough to it to make no difference. There's a tumbler of scotch in front of him, and that should put color in his cheeks if anything can, but he doesn't seem to be drinking it. He's staring at precisely nothing as far as Alex can tell. If he's not interacting, being in the bar won't help him any more than sitting in his apartment, working on his narratives of where he was. His reports on the nonexistent past are as meticulous as the ones he's filed in the present about cases that actually happened, and he seems to go over them constantly, losing himself in the delusions whenever he has the chance.

When Sam is thinking about them, he is more still than a healthy man should be. He looks like pictures of himself from the hospital before he woke up, frozen in time. Alex is fully aware of the dangers of tanning and skin cancer, to the extent that she hates letting Molly out of the house without sunscreen on, but in Sam's case she's tempted to prescribe some kind of outdoor activity until he loses his deathly pallor. If he's willing to take her advice about bars, maybe he'll take her advice about that, too. Sam could certainly benefit from a long walk in the sunshine.

Alex orders a glass of the house red and pulls up a stool next to him, putting on a smile halfway between professional and friendly. "I'd ask if you come here often," she says, and lets the ludicrousness of the line hang in the air.

Sam smiles at her with the faintest wrinkle of his eyes, dutifully amused and nothing more. He's not entirely with her. "Good evening, Doctor Drake."

"Alex," she tells him, not for the first time.

Sam looks into his glass and repeats it. "Alex."

"Are you here alone?" she asks, though it's clear that his only companions are the ghosts in his head.

He looks up, looks through her for a moment, and then says, "Not anymore."

Alex drinks some of her wine to warm herself. Everything Sam's mother and friends have told her about him is the opposite of the man beside her. He is dynamic, driven, alive, they say.

They do not say, "Bring him back to us," but Alex knows that's what they mean.

She tries to think of something to talk about with him that has nothing to do with work, but he's missed so much of the last year that it's hard to think of a topic that won't alienate him, and everything they have in common is imaginary. She falls back on banality. "Where did you find your shirt?"

He smiles when he touches the fabric, a real, bright smile that lasts nearly a full heartbeat. She hasn't seen that expression on his face in connection with anything tangible yet, though when he was talking about some of the figments of his imagination, he occasionally beamed like a sunrise. "One of those high street shops, of all places. Would you believe this material's come back into fashion?" Sam clucks his tongue. "The stuff doesn't breathe, and the pattern is--retro." He swallows and looks at Alex, searching her face for something she can't guess at. "It feels wrong, still."

"That's normal," Alex tells him, and finds herself slipping into her official soothing voice. "It's like cultural shock, I suppose."

"Yes, exactly." Sam scrubs at his sideburns, which are pretty retro in and of themselves. "Like going to Mexico, and getting used to the heat, the noise, and the music there, and then coming home and finding that it's November."

It's April, and a particularly fine one at that, but Alex doesn't point that out. "Do you feel more comfortable wearing that kind of shirt, then?"

"No. Yes. I don't know." Sam swirls the liquid in his glass but doesn't drink any.

Alex drinks in sympathy before she says anything else. "I can see why you haven't tried to wear it round the office, at least. I don't suppose many people would find the latest trend particularly appropriate at your level of responsibility."

He freezes, and Alex thinks of the hospital pictures again: helpless, static Sam surrounded by monitors beeping away. She wants to reach back through time and wake him then or reach down the bar and wake him now. Even bleached February-white, he is an attractive man. If he were entirely present, and the man he once was, Alex suspects she might have dragged him off already. As it is, she takes a deep breath and begins again.

She's said the wrong thing and she can't think what it might have been. "It suits you," Alex adds. "I mean, not everyone can make that look work."

"Thanks," he says, and there's another moment where a healthier man would flirt back. Sam meets her eyes for a moment, more solidly, but that's all.

Alex drains her glass and catches the bartender's eye for a refill. "Did you find a lot of shirts in that style?" she asks, and she knows she's stretching a simple question entirely too far for a reasonable conversation, but he's giving her nothing to work with.

"A few." Sam sniffs the glass--just sniffs it, like it's a fine brandy in a snifter instead of God knows what in a tumbler--and sets it down. "I got used to having to be careful with my laundry--I mean--"

"Ah," Alex says, and gets her fresh glass, and drinks. There's no point in telling him again and again that his little world isn't real. Either he's heard her by now or he hasn't.

Sam stares into his liquor as if it holds the key to something, and she's damned if she's going to ask what. He's quiet for two minutes, then three.

Alex considers getting up and leaving him, but it feels like it would be a dereliction of duty even if she's off duty, even if technically she probably oughtn't to be drinking with a patient, even a patient who is damned handsome, or will be when he's whole again. She stays, and half her wine is gone again before she knows what to say next. "How are things with you and, and Maya?"

He frowns slightly, not an uncomfortable frown but a confused one, and doesn't quite ask, "Who?" before his expression clears. "We're going our separate ways. She's in love, and she has my blessing." It feels like a rote answer, the sort of thing people say years after a divorce.

Alex kicks her foot against the bar stool and admits that she was looking for some kind of pain, there. Any kind of acknowledgment that he's awake would be an improvement. "That's nice," she says instead, equally bland.

"I keep thinking I ought to ring her mum."

The words make her shiver, not because there's anything terribly off in calling an old girlfriend's mother, but she saw the notes about that layer of the delusion. She drinks to steel herself. "Best not, I'd say. Or if you do, make a list of things you'll say and stick to it."

"Right." Sam goes silent again, barely moving except to breathe.

Somewhere in there, under the daze and the layers of false memories, there is a man who is clearly capable of feeling things deeply. She's heard it in his voice during his stories, especially when he spoke of the techniques that his subconscious constructs used to fight crime--and exactly what conglomeration of history, stereotypical television programs, and subliminal desires had created all of that is beyond her understanding. Sam could care about many things, and does care.

It's the wine--it must be the wine--that makes her wonder if he could turn that passion on her. If she matched it with her own, would it wake him?

She has a brief vision of using the same techniques he decried to her to get his attention. How he spoke about the physical violence he experienced--perhaps a reworking of the times when his body felt pain--makes Alex think of replaying it with him, slamming him against a wall to get his attention. Then she considers what she's imagining: assaulting a fellow officer who was recently hit by a car, of all things.

Her imagination is running away with her nearly as much as Sam's does with him.

Sam tilts his glass side to side slowly, in time to his breath.

"Are you going to drink that?" Alex asks, snapping at him before she realizes how irritating the fidgeting is.

It gets a response, at least. Sam blinks at her and meets her eyes again, and for a second it looks like he's there. "I don't know."

"Sorry," Alex says. "It's just that you've been playing with it since I got in, and--" she waggles her empty wineglass, both for demonstration and to call for another.

Perhaps she shouldn't, under the circumstances; it's better not to antagonize the recuperating patients, truly, and she's already having terrible images of hurting him. But the anger sparked some response in him.

And her glass is full again.

So be it.

"I--" Sam swallows, the strain in his throat visible with his pale skin and weakened muscles, and doesn't wince at the burn. "I dreamed about it a lot, that's all," he says, and sips it.

Alex smiles and realizes a second too late that it looks like she's smiling because he's drinking rather than because he described the experience as a dream. "It does smell rather like the sort of thing your 'Gene Hunt' would drink." If she didn't have a wine glass in her hand, she'd give that the inverted commas it deserves; she enunciates them instead.

"Exclusively. And I do mean exclusively--I can't remember ever seeing him take so much as a sip of water." Sam's eyes go far-off again.

That's not at all what he's meant to be doing. Alex curses herself silently. "Is it your favorite tipple, too?"

Sam laughs, then seems to hear himself and stops. "I don't drink much. Didn't drink--" he holds the glass up like it's a chunk of amber with some precious insect caught in it, then drinks it off in one go.

For a man who doesn't drink, it's improbably impressive. It's more likely that he has either a touch of retrograde amnesia about that habit, or that he's lying. On the whole, Alex has found Sam Tyler to be one of her more transparent patients when he's willing to open his mouth, but everything she sees through him is in his stories.

Maybe this is, too, refracted somehow. "You're not a recovering alcoholic, are you?" she asks. There hadn't been anything in his file about it, but if he'd been going to meetings on his own, there wouldn't have been.

Sam sets down his empty glass and gives her a smile that's more manic than real. It fades like the rest. "Is this where I say 'Not anymore'?" He shakes his head. "No, honestly, I wasn't much for a pint before--" he bites the words back, and Alex wishes she knew what he won't let himself say.

"Ah." Alex toasts him with her wine--third glass, is it, or fourth? Doesn't matter much, as Molly's at Evan's for the weekend. "Is it helping?"

"Helping what?" Sam turns the glass in his hands.

"You look so cold." Alex studies his face and finds him studying her back. "I know alcohol doesn't actually warm you up, scientifically speaking, but it should feel like it does."

Sam raises his eyebrows. "Doesn't it, then?"

"No; it's all to do with blood vessels and I don't know what, not when I'm half-pissed." Alex waves her hand, disclaiming all responsibility and biological knowledge. "But it should make you feel warmer, or you're drinking the wrong stuff."

"It did sometimes," Sam says, and he's gone again, back to his memories that he made up, tranquil as the grave.

Alex sighs loudly enough that he looks up, with a momentary pause at her breasts. Now, that is an improvement she hadn't expected, and certainly not from a single serving of anything. "You went off again," she accuses him, keeping her voice gentle so it's more a tease than anything else.

Sam shakes his head. "It's hard to remember what happened before, that's all. I know people, the important people like my mum and Maya, but if you ask me to tell you about something I did, or something I experienced, even something I ate--" he closes his eyes. "I don't remember what proper _mole_ sauce tastes like anymore. I know the word, and I know I liked it, but not why."

The professional in Alex is making notes, though Sam's brain has been inspected, injected, detected, and all the rest of it, and if he'd had a stroke someone would've noticed by now. "There's a place that does decent Mexican a few blocks from here," she offers, and then realizes that on one hand, that sounds like a date, and on the other, she is rather drunk.

It's a blessing for her career, then, that Sam doesn't seem to notice. "I had dinner already," he says. "Though--again--I couldn't tell you what. Fish, maybe. Indian. Chinese." He itches the corner of his eye with one finger.

Alex touches his shoulder and finds that he is not nearly as chilly as he seems. "I'm sorry," she says. "That must be terrible."

"I don't think it was especially good, or I would remember something," Sam says, and looks at her hand like it's a butterfly perched on him, foreign and chaotic.

"Have you tried making notes?" He's made enough notes on unreality that she knows he can record a great deal of pertinent information if he tries.

"Why bother?" Sam mimes writing. "Got up, went out. Had breakfast, full English. Coffee terrible. Tomato overdone. Went to office, talked to the good Doctor, who took better notes than I did. Had lunch. Fish paste sandwich, boring. Knocked off early, doctor's orders. Watched telly. Insert guide here, nothing on worth recalling anyway. Had beef tea. Went to sleep. Got up, did it again."

Alex winces at every new entry, but hardest at the mention of herself. She should be doing something to make this better, and she hasn't yet. "Do something you'll want to keep in your mind, Sam."

His eyes are bleak and unfocused. They may as well be closed for all the good they're doing him. He isn't seeing anything. "I have done."

"Here. Now." Alex thumps her hand on the bar. "If you just let yourself drift, you'll never have a reason to care."

"There's nothing I want to do." Sam looks through her.

Alex prepares a full report in excruciatingly self-reflective detail later on why it is the worst of all possible ideas for a psychologist in her position to interact with a patient in his outside of the workplace.

Later.

She includes information on transference and ways in which projection can work for the doctor as well as the patient.

Afterward.

She makes especial note of the thorough-going foolishness that is allowing oneself to harbor any sort of attraction to a patient for longer than it takes to note it and pass over it.

Soon.

She kisses Sam, who is not cold at all, who tastes of scotch and does not move for long enough that she sobers, still skin-to-skin with him, in a flash of horrible adrenalin that shows her how her career ends: molesting a patient in a bar, sexually harassing him entirely against his will, and embarrassing both of them besides.

Now--

When her heart is beating too quickly and she fears it's going to stop as dead as her reputation, Sam does move, a flicker, a kiss, light and quick, and he pats her shoulder, unimpressed but unoffended. She knows what he'll say before he says it, and her face is hot with shame as she sits back and waits for him to lower the guillotine.

"Sorry, Alex," Sam says. "I'm a bit involved with someone else."

There's no one in his daily log notes, no one he's ever mentioned, no one at all who could possibly qualify as anyone he might be involved with.

Alex looks at his eyes, which aren't focused anywhere in the right century, and doesn't ask. "My fault, sorry," she says, and stands up. "I'll be off."

"I'll see you in the morning," Sam says, calm as anything even though there's a bit of her lipstick on his lower lip, and looks at his watch. "Nine-o'clock, yes?"

Alex says, "Yes. See you then."

"Good night," Sam says, and goes back to staring into his empty glass.

Alex sighs and shakes her head, then makes herself go. She'll do better by him tomorrow. She's sure of it.


End file.
